In the giant cesspool of potentially godawful film ideas, there appears to be no drain at the bottom that would allow the goofiest of all the pitches to float away. Instead they’re left to cycle back into the Hollywood consciousness anew. If you’d like to know what I’m referring to, please turn to page 37. If you’d prefer to just give up now, it’s already too late.
20th Century Fox is close to acquiring the rights to bring the popular Choose Your Own Adventure book series into theaters (and more!), with John Davis and John Fox of Davis Entertainment attached to produce. According to The Hollywood Reporter, the studio hopes the series will lead to “a crossplatform four-quadrant action-adventure franchise.” Whoa. They do realize these aren’t Marvel comics, right?
Choose Your Own Adventure was the brainchild of Edward Packard, who teamed up with fellow author R.A. Montgomery and eventually turned the series into a giant success, spawning spinoffs and knockoffs galore (my favorites were the Nintendo tie-in from the early ‘90s). Montgomery retained the rights – he created U-Ventures, which will create “divergent storytelling apps" – and he’ll be an executive producer on the film project along with Daniela Taplin of Red Crown, the company that initially started this adventure-choosing feature escapade.
While Fox will hold all rights to the properties, that doesn’t make figuring out what to do with them any easier, as the books crossed all genres and locations. Will it use multi-endings of Clue! a s a reference, or will the multi-platform goal try and highlight interconnection, like Syfy’s TV and video game Defiance? Or perhaps something as experimental as Ned Benson’s upcoming dual-film The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby will be more similar. Any way you look at it, it’s probably not going to be amazing.
